Revisiting Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism

Suppose you want to wake people up to the human cost of poverty and to energize them with some urgency towards productive social action. And suppose you are a skilled writer. Your public, though well intentioned, is ignorant and more than a little obtuse, inclined to think of the lives of the poor (especially, perhaps, the distant or foreign poor) as not equally real. How do you write, if you want to inform their perceptions and inspire useful choices?

You could, of course, present your audience with a lot of data; but data don’t easily reach the part of our minds with which we see others as fully human. (It is said of Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times that she had learned of the poor of Coketown as if they were so many ants and beetles, “passing to and from their nests”). It is plausible to think what Dickens clearly thought: that you can’t really change the heart without telling a story. What Dickens knew intuitively has now been confirmed experimentally. C. Daniel Batson’s magisterial work on empathy and altruism shows that a particularized narrative of suffering has unique power to produce motives for constructive action.

I think this is true not just for the politics of poverty, but for politics, period. Paul Krugman likes to say that “reality has a liberal bias.” I don’t think that’s true at all, but I do think that liberalism seems to be more true to many people because it feels more true, or at least more decent — and this is in part because liberal claims and truths are suited for storytelling in a way that conservatism aren’t. Conor Friedersdorf wrote about this four years ago, arguing that conservatism needs fewer policy analysts and polemicists, and more storytellers. Excerpt:

Escaping this ghetto requires understanding why the media slants left. Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics, there isn’t any elite liberal conspiracy at work. Bias creeps in largely because the narrative conventions of journalism are poor at capturing basic conservative and libertarian truths. An instructive example is rent control. A newspaper reporter assigned that topic can easily find a sympathetic family no longer able to afford its longtime apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood. Their plight is a moving brief for a rent ceiling.

As almost everyone long ago conceded, however, opponents of rent control offer superior counterarguments. Limiting rent degrades the quality of a city’s housing stock, causes shortages as a dearth of new units are built, and spurs a black market where well-connected elites game their way into subsidized flats. A talented reporter, given enough time and space, could craft a narrative that illustrates how rent control ultimately makes poor families worse off. His job is relatively difficult, however, for he can hardly write a pithy anecdotal lead about the hundred families that won’t occupy a non-existent apartment building because a foolish policy eliminated an unknown developer’s incentive to build it.

The right, in other words, has a problem with narrative. The stubborn facts of this world contradict pieties left, right, and libertarian, occassionally forcing each group to revise its thinking. But the core critiques of liberalism intrinsically resist the narrative form. Who can foresee the unintended consequences of government intervention in advance? Who can pinpoint the particular threats to liberty posed by an ever-growing public sector?

I think conservative themes may be more difficult to illustrate in compelling personal narrative, but by no means impossible. Reading Conor’s essay again, I am reminded of the time I was at a convenience store around the corner from my apartment on Capitol Hill. The old Korean man behind the counter, whose store it was, got into it with a young black man. I don’t know what it was about, but the young black man started screaming at the old Korean man, who barely spoke English, called him racist names, made threats. Everybody in the store was scared. This was the early 1990s, and this young man could have had a gun (gun crime was not uncommon in our neighborhood back then). The young man finally left the store, still screaming, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The old man stoically returned to checking customers out.

The whole incident, though, was emotionally galvanizing. It was horrible to see that old man humiliated like that by this racist black thug. In fact, all of us customers had been humiliated by that man — he must have been 19 or 20 — and forced to watch the old man’s humiliation, because we were all afraid of that man’s implicit threat of violence.

For days, I found I couldn’t let that go. That old immigrant man and his family operated the only convenience store in the neighborhood. When snowstorms came, they were open. Was he the embodiment of sunshine and fluffy bunnies? By no means. He was a gruff old man who spoke no English. But he kept a clean store, and he kept that store open during snowstorms. I thought about how the Koreans of Washington, DC, took on all kinds of risks — physical risks, I’m talking about — to run convenience stores in poor, black parts of Washington, and suffered frequent racist abuse and threats of criminal assault from young black men.

Look, I know there are two sides to this story. Black folks in those neighborhoods complain a lot about being disrespected by Korean merchants. There must be something to this. Still, thinking back on that incident I saw today, it stands as a metaphor for the emotional experience of living under siege by black male crime in Washington of that era. What that Korean shopkeeper experienced, what all of us experienced (and we weren’t all white or Asian; a frightened middle-aged black woman stood at my left elbow during this incident, no doubt praying as hard as I was that the thug would simply leave without hitting the old man or pulling a gun) — that was an emotional touchstone of life in the era. It told a story about race, and crime, and social conflict, and even economics. For example: why is it that Koreans who come to this country having nothing, not even a good grasp of English, thrive as entrepreneurs in those neighborhoods, while the people who have lived in those neighborhoods for generations do not?

The point here is not to solve the black-Korean dispute, or even to apportion blame. The point is to say that this is a story that could have explored conservative truths about culture through narrative. There are others, surely. Question for the room: Can you think of conservative truths and narratives that could illustrate them, and make readers more open to the conservative viewpoint, by which I mean a more conservative way to understand or to address the problem?

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38 Responses to Revisiting Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism

Re: Who can foresee the unintended consequences of government intervention in advance?

The problem I have with the argument by unintended consequence is that unintended consequences are present in everything we do or do not do: even a decision to do nothing carries unintended consequences with it. As such it’s a total wash and contributes nothing to any debate.
This applies to unintended consequences that are also unforeseeable. If something is known to be a potential downside to a given action, then of course it needs to be taken into account.

In the last 40 years, would you say policy towards the poor and poverty has tilted more liberal or more conservative? Of those two options, how do you think it played out? I think most people would argue that conservative, by the power of its a-factual narratives (“poverty is all about welfare queens in Cadillacs and young bucks buying tbone steaks with food stamps”) got the better of the deal. So what, exactly, is Friedersdorf complaining about? That we haven’t been hard enough on punishing the poor and that conservatives have too much data? That doesn’t sound like how things have turned out at all.

A talented reporter, given enough time and space, could craft a narrative that illustrates how rent control ultimately makes poor families worse off.

It just so happens that I have lived in a city that got rid of rent control while I lived there. It turns out that rent control makes the housing stock worse off. It doesn’t create a shortage of housing as much as it creates a shortage of expensive housing. The poor families are mostly fine. The big losers in rent control are well-paid professionals looking for high-quality housing stock who are shut out of the city because of a lack of high-rent luxury apartments that they are looking for.

DC has threaded this needle by subjecting large landlords to rent control, while exempting smaller landlords (including homeowners who rent out their basement) and increasing housing stock by building large condominium buildings to absorb the influx of professionals looking for high quality housing stock. I can’t say it works great, but it hasn’t turned the city into some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland of crumbling housing that anti-rent-control economists claim it would.

The problem is not conservative memes. I am black. When I think in terms of pure ideology I tend to trend conservative. The problem is the people behind the conservative memes. I read your blog above. The dude was black. We get it. He was thug. Being black and being a thug seem to hand-in-hand in your way of thinking. Why would I want to be a part of that club?

[Note from Rod: The man’s treatment of the Korean was not, in that context, separate from race, regarding the broader story of conflict between DC’s black and Korean populations. Race was important in both cases. The story I think important here, from a conservative perspective, is the story about culture clash and economic progress. It is unavoidable that we talk about race in this particular case. Why would you assume that “being black and being a thug seem to hand-in-hand in your way of thinking?” I could be wrong, but to believe that based on what I presented here seems to validate the view that there is no way for conservatives to talk about race without being called racist. In turn, it makes many conservatives think there’s no point in trying. — RD]

The conservative issue that is made for storytelling is the anti-abortion one, of course. There are a million beautiful stiories about women in tough circumstances who had their babies, and the baby in her arms is an image that no other storyline can best. This transcends liberal-conservative; it’s built into the human race for our survival. This is why nearly every story that comes out of Hollywood, that treats unexpected pregnancy, ends with the woman having her baby. Having an abortion is a bummer storyline, and what’s the best it can offer? “I had an abortion and my life went on as it had before.”

This advantage hasn’t helped the pro-life cause politically, but it remains profoundly moving on a primitive level, and may be one reason young people poll increasingly anti-abortion. The social negative, though, is that it tends to normalize unwed childbearing, because the storyline of “I placed my child for adoption and it went on as before” isn’t as compelling, either.

I can’t think of economic issues, but I think many social issues are good for narrative from a conservative perspective. In fact, I think that is precisely why we have a more negative view of divorce and abortion than when I was in my twenties some years (ok, decades) ago.

From a long-ago NYT piece by a man who was helpless to stop his girlfriend’s abortion of their planned child, to Judith Wallerstein’s research on divorce, conservative narratives have shaped views on these issues.

I think the “reality has a liberal bias” quote is originally attributed to Stephen Colbert and was intended as irony, not a serious statement (which is how I think Krugman employs it as well.) It’s not to say that liberalism is more rooted in reality, but that modern Fox News/talk radio conservatism is decidedly less so.

The further irony is that it is this very conservatism that is so successful in the media because it tells stories– stories that resonate. Stories of the small-business owner overburdened by taxes, the white kid who didn’t get into college because of affirmative action, the pharmacist who is punished with a lawsuit for following his conscience because he refused to sell birth control to a woman. If you think conservatism (in the broad sense) is struggling because it can’t tell stories, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

This is an interesting observation. I’ve generally thought that it works the other way around, that Americans are “operationally liberal but nominally conservative”. We support liberal programs of all stripes, but the story we tell about ourselves and our country is a conservative one (rugged individualism, etc).

Perhaps the real story is that life is complicated, politics is complicated, and there’s always a temptation to think the other side is winning because of their story telling. (Which incidentally is a way of conferring virtue on your own side — we have all these good ideas, because we’re smart, but the other side has nice bumper stickers.)

I think focusing on the unintended consequences of certain things is not even really necessary. We *know* the consequences of plenty of liberal ideas. Liberals have not have any new ideas since the heady days of the ’60s and ’70s, and are now mostly focused on preserving those days.

Can you think of conservative truths and narratives that could illustrate them

Satirize political correctness, the ridiculousness of American higher education, the pornographic titillation and violence of the media always trying to top itself. Or–Dramatize what it means to be a single parent–how difficult it is for all but the most well-off or well-connected.

Here’s what I would say the problem is: conservatives *could* be doing these things, but they don’t seem to *want* to. They don’t care about stories. They will maintain tons of blogs cataloguing these things as they appear in the real world, but when it comes to narrative, to telling a story, following a character or set of characters through an arc, they’re not interested. They don’t seem to have the attention span. They seem to feel that “real life” is already there, all around us, and it’s enough to pick out from it whatever liberal hypocrisy Drudge is highlighting that day, laugh/shake their heads, and move on.

There are still plenty of conservatives out there who *appreciate*, say, Kingsley Amis, Waugh, or Thomas Wolfe, but none of today’s conservatives, even the appreciative ones, seem at all interested in *doing* what those gentlemen did, or in supporting modern-day versions of them, if there are any.

Tip 1: don’t tell this story. Tip 2: Let your stories explore truths, without worrying whether they are “conservative truths” or not. If you do it the other way, your “illustrations” will seem like propaganda or ideology to the reader. These might be stirring to the reader looking for ideological reassurance, but will be dismissed by others.

I think narrative is one reason that the pro-life position hasn’t been as vulnerable to the left’s critique as other conservative positions have. It generally makes for a better story than the pro-choice alternative.

“Can you think of conservative truths and narratives that could illustrate them, and make readers more open to the conservative viewpoint, by which I mean a more conservative way to understand or to address the problem?”

Conservatives need to take back from the Left what is meant by the “general welfare” or the “common good.” “For the Common Good” really is a small “r”epublican campaign slogan (see Nausbaum). This isn’t crunchy con or compassionate conservatism. This is conservatism that understands that the law can be used to shore up the general welfare and it can be used to undermine the general welfare. For example, a distinction needs to be made between honest profit making and legislatively induced rent seeking. And the ultimate forms of rent seeking can be found through the laws created by liberals e.g. Obama Care, Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, which all are lawyer full-employment acts.

As you say, all this needs to be done through stories. John Q. Public could care less about some policy analysis that comes out of Heritage, Cato, or AEI.

It seems to me that liberalism and conservatism are both capable of sound policymaking, and of retreating to pleasant-but-irrelevant narrative.

I’m under the impression that liberals were out of touch in the 1970s, more interested in political correctness and victim politics than rational policy. Of course, that’s where today’s Republican Party is– defined by resentment, incapable of offering rational thought on economic policy or foreign policy. (That’s why Romney’s advisers, and VP candidate, were architects and supporters of Bush-era policies like Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the occupation of Iraq, surplus-destroying fiscal policies, etc.). In 2009, as Americans paid less in taxes than they had since the Truman era and less than any OECD country except Australia, we saw a conservative backlash against taxation.

Neither side is immune to prioritizing emotionally resonant narratives over rational argumentation. These things come and go within movements and parties.

While I agree that the ability to manifest the particular through storytelling is essential to any thriving civilization, this is only half the story.

Conservatives, in many instances, have internalized the critique of the left, namely, that they are, at bottom, irrational and hostile to critical thinking. Although egalitarianism, feminism, socialism, and multiculturalism are opposed to any sane view of human life, liberals constantly act as if the only skepticism that makes one unreasonable is skepticism regarding their own quasi-religious beliefs, e.g. global warming.

To combat this, conservatives intentionally articulate their critique of the welfare state with the use of numbers and data. This is certainly laudable, but, as you say, there is something missing if an argument cannot be made in a moral or literary manner. The real response, though, is to say that the left was wrong all along. The conservative critique of liberalism is not irrational or unscientific, and we should not worry that our arguments are not all articulated in the manner of some faceless think tank.

I think that there’s an argument to be made that the story you share here is being shared, over and over and over again, on the evening news. You live anywhere near an urban area? There’s no shortage of stories being told about violence.

Which is to say, I am not sure I understand your question. I agree that a lot of conservative obsessions are hard to share in a narrative. You don’t see a lot of great novels about the Gold Standard or lower marginal tax rates.

First, we need to know what counts as conservative. I think there are some great stories to be told about the Drug War. But is that a conservative thing or a liberal thing?

Generally, I think that the conservative angst over “bias” in the media and in Hollywood leads to an unproductive, didactic approach to storytelling. That is, if you begin the process by looking for especially “conservative” stories to tell, you are in trouble from the get go.

Is Big Bang Theory liberal or conservative? What about American Idol or Star Wars?

Actually Rod I think the right used to be very good at telling stories. By 1980 ,everyone could tell the story of how failures in liberal social policy, liberal economic policy, activist liberal court decisions etc. had let to urban decay, soaring crime rates, family break down, declining public services in the cities, and the flight of whites and even some blacks to the suburbs. Every right leaning voter could tell this story and even alot of liberals knew it had a very large grain of truth. But the story is old and many things have happened since then such that the narrative no longer resonates. Many best known cities in America are racially diverse and booming full of ambitious hard working high income people even though many are liberals. All this while life in right leaning small towns seems to be on the decline, with lots of illegitimacy, poverty, low wage sporadic work, drug abuse etc.

Conservatives are not so much bad at telling stories. They just need to learn to tell updated ones to reflect the facts on the ground today. The Reagan era narrative of liberal engineered decline that many still want to tell is increasingly out of date. And frankly an updated story today would be hard to tell for conservatives because an honest telling would indict alot of conservative policies as much as liberal ones. Overfinancialization of the economy? Obsession with lowering taxes for the wealthy which often did not lead to more investments and jobs? The debacle in Iraq?? I could go on..

I have always had this feeling that I might have watched and enjoyed conservative stories, but since I don’t know what “conservative truths” are I might not be aware of it (I don’t have that problem with liberal truths since I grew up watching Star Trek TNG).

I think to tell good stories conservatives need to give up on the idea that liberals are evil socialists, and accept that mostly they want success too but view the path differently. Then always bring forward examples of people who have done well and made something of themselves – acknowledge that education and infastructure may have helped but good old fashioned hard work made the ultimate success possible.

This isn’t so much about having conservatives write fiction that plays to conservative tropes in the hopes that this changes ideas, but, as James C. says, constructing the anecdote that is worth more in a simple telling than reams of data and statistics.

The thing is that conservatives are already good at that, to the point where they realized that anecdotes that are totally at odds with reality are more effective than grappling with actual facts. Conservatives are way ahead on this score, and I fail to see how the problem with conservatives is that they’re not anecdotal enough. They succeeded as much as they possibly could using those tactics, and the problem was that they were so at odds with reality and the actual problems of citizens that eventually the well went dry.

That said, it may be what Conor is calling for is a new set of narratives for 2012– Republicans had a lot of success in 2010 with socialist death panels taking money from gramma to give to deadbeats, but that lacks resonance in 2012. But that’s the thing– the narratives and anecdotes are ever-shifting. It’s not that conservatives don’t understand the power of narrative and storytelling, it’s that they confused a narrative device with reality, and the public doesn’t find unbelievable narratives compelling after 2 years or so.

“Is Big Bang Theory liberal or conservative?”
Considering the way Sheldon’s Texan born-again Christian mother is mocked and reading creator Chuck Lorre’s vanity cards at the end of each episode, yeah, I’d say The Big Bang Theory is liberal.
“Conservatives need to give up on the idea that liberals are evil socialists…”
When liberals give up on the idea that conservatives are evil, greedy racists. Recently a few liberal friends of mine found out I was a conservative Republican (we had never discussed politics before). You’d think I had told them I was into kiddie porn. They were shocked and one said, “How can you be a Republican? You’re so nice!” The next day one of these friends called me and said that they had all lost some respect for me.
Rod, why do you have to make readers more open to the conservative viewpoint? Is this not The American CONSERVATIVE? Or is this The Daily Dish?

Maybe it’s not a narrative issue, it’s a monopoly issue. The conservative message machine is extremely effective at taking a story and getting everyone to discuss it with the same talking points. So we have the inane “War on Christmas” or the even more inane Joe the Plumber.

The problem isn’t the story, it’s that poor choices by out-of-touch GOP bigwigs combined with a rabid RINO-hunting culture have created an intense focus on only the dumbest narratives.

Every fiction demands of the reader/listener to let the narrator limit the frame of reference and possibilities in a way that still has to be congruent with and deferential to the reality in which the reader/listener lives. Leaving aside the problem of propaganda (which does not contain enough truth for a writer with integrity to do), American conservatism these days is so strained and in such disagreement with American social reality that the conceit of coherence with each other is perhaps the greatest fiction in any such work.

Race is of course a toxic and hopeless subject, conservatism having no morally credible notion of bigotry or chauvinism. Abortion…well, abortion realistically is not a social problem of middle class white people in good mental health these days.

If conservatism is a serious endeavor- which is doubtful- it would address the great winnowing and social crashing out of the mentally unwell in our times. Which is to say, how society and families are to best cope with that.

Carol, even if some liberals hold those views (most don’t), how does it help our cause if we decide to hold equally ridiculous views about our political opponents? All that accomplishes is to cause people to stop listening before we get to our stories.
And part of the value of a magazine or blog like this IS to reach new readers and people who may not call themselves conservative. Any reasonable political movement needs new members and can answer their questions without feeling threatened. Conservatives could easily stay in their comfort zone by only talking to each other but in the long run that is the road to political oblivion. We do not need to change our ideas to attract new members but we need to at least talk to new people (or write to them).

Conservatives do have stories. Most of them involve good white people being victimized by angry, barbaric outsiders, usually of a different color, and this requiring some kind of extremist action to redeem or save their world from these threatening strangers. Your little story of the Korean grocer and the big bad black guy is an example.

Mitt Romney’s comment about the 47% is a variation on this basic story – that lazy bad people, some of them even white, are sucking off the teat of the good, civilized, moral and hard-working people. This has been a successful conservative story for a long time. Reagan used it quite well in all his tales of welfare queens getting rich off the system.

It’s not that conservatives have no stories, it’s just that most of them are horror stories about boogeymen we should be afraid of, and deal with harshly, so as to restore the true order of civilized society. The Shire is itself one of those stories. It seems so basic to the conservative universe, that perhaps they don’t even notice that this is a story. They think it is simply reality. They see the liberals as having stories, and they lament their own lack of same, not realizing that how they see the world is also a story, and a fairly successful one at that.

Whether conservatives or liberals have better storytelling varies issue-by-issue. One area where liberals have had massive difficulties coming up with a convincing story is Keynesian economics. The “our economic troubles are caused by the government spending more than it takes in” story, by contrast, has been massively successful, even convincing some people who are liberal on most issues.

“Actually Rod I think the right used to be very good at telling stories. By 1980 ,everyone could tell the story of how failures in liberal social policy, liberal economic policy, activist liberal court decisions etc. had let to urban decay, soaring crime rates, family break down, declining public services in the cities, and the flight of whites and even some blacks to the suburbs.” Oh my! That gave me a good laugh. Yeah it was all that liberalism that made banks and insurance companies redline inner cities so that no business could open there anymore. I’m not saying that these other things like disastrous public housing policies didn’t have a negative impact. They did. But it was a lot more than “liberalism” that led to urban decay.

But about the idea of story-telling, I have heard a lot of stories that get at my gut-level conservatism even though I am as liberal as they come. Your story about the Korean store owner rings a bell with me. I have seen similar scenes play out with young black males, usually high school age stealing from Korean grocers, threatening them, telling them to “suck my d#ck!” and feeling absolutely outraged at these kids, their parents for not raising them right, and at all of us present for being afraid to stand up to them. That kind of story speaks to me of fraying bonds of family and community, failures of the educational system and religious institutions. It makes me rage against my fellow liberals who want more “programs” for these young people. Liberals and conservatives could spend all day telling each other stories and we would likely come out of it agreeing on a lot of things. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen much.

When it comes to gay rights, that’s been advanced largely on the basis of liberal story-telling, and it’s hard to see what stories the social right could tell to counter that. Just about every family now has gays somewhere in the extended family and so understands them as real flesh and blood people, not the boogeymen the AFA and FRC try to paint them.
Sunday a 90 year lady at church told me (over our Oktoberfest luncheon) that she was voting in favor of Maryland’s gay marriage referendum mainly because her great-niece and girlfriend deserved to be able to marry too.

The odds are Mom is working two jobs at minimum wage to make ends meet and dad is rotting in a prison somewhere for having been busted in possession of a couple of rock of crack or ounces of pot…

(2007 – race & prison – prison population by race and sex) “Similar to men in the general prison population (93%), parents held in the nation’s prisons at midyear 2007 were mostly male (92%) (not shown in table). More than 4 in 10 fathers were black, about 3 in 10 were white, and about 2 in 10 were Hispanic (appendix table 2). An estimated 1,559,200 children had a father in prison at midyear 2007; nearly half (46%) were children of black fathers.

“Almost half (48%) of all mothers held in the nation’s prisons at midyear 2007 were white, 28% were black, and 17% were Hispanic. Of the estimated 147,400 children with a mother in prison, about 45% had a white mother. A smaller percentage of the children had a black (30%) or Hispanic (19%) mother.”

One area where liberals have had massive difficulties coming up with a convincing story is Keynesian economics. The “our economic troubles are caused by the government spending more than it takes in” story, by contrast, has been massively successful, even convincing some people who are liberal on most issues.

Keynesian is highly counter-intuitive, but it actually makes sense if you think about it.

People who don’t have money will not buy goods & services leading employers to lay off people due to a lack of demand which will lead to more people not having money therefor not buying goods & services forcing employers to lay off more people, and on and on it goes. The easiest and pretty much the only way to break that vicious circle is to put money in people’s hands so that they can go buy goods and services generating demand which forces employers to hire which in turn puts more money in people’s hand which in turn generates more demand which generates more jobs…

Or you tell a story that the unemployed are lazy bastards who are getting exactly what they deserve, and if you are in the US it’s easy to go with the lazy bastard story in that a large number of the unemployed are minorities who can easily be demonized.

It’s similar to trade, every one believes that having a positive balance of trade is a good thing and generally it is, and it is possible for individual countries to have positive balance of trade but it’s impossible for every country to have a positive balance of trade.

“The odds are Mom is working two jobs at minimum wage to make ends meet and dad is rotting in a prison somewhere for having been busted in possession of a couple of rock of crack or ounces of pot…”

Yes, Don Quijote. I know all that. I’m a liberal, remember? All of that CANNOT excuse the behavior I described. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own behavior. Should we tell the abused elderly Korean store owner that he’s being “racist” if he tries not to let these kids steal from him?

Sheldon’s mother is mocked? That’s not how I read TBBT; the joke is that she’s about the only character able to read Sheldon accurately and play him appropriately, which makes her about the most highly-functioning person in the show.

Fascinating argument about how the media is so liberal because it tends to dramatise so much, and about problems of imagination in the conservative movement.

There is no doubt that people who do not have housing where they would like because of rent control are never talked to because they are very rich and not potentially attractive topics.

It is also true that the issue of how conservatives have trouble with the media, before the late 1970s, were not so marked, but I am surprised in a sense that conservatives take stories like those of Tolkien as if they were real. This is very different from how he was popular in the 1960s with people who did not share his political or religious worldviews (and in a manner not possible in a world dominated by the Sex Pistols, AC/DC, Pantera or N.W.A.). These people dramatise the problems selfish urban workers and welfare recipients have, whether its representative of Middle America or not.